Author: EarlD Page 2 of 304

Two Hours of “The Five Year Engagement”

On September 11, 2024

Much of the dialogue in Nicholas Stoller’s The Five Year Engagement (2012) is strictly for adolescents. It’s childishly raunchy. Also, it’s a movie other people have found funnier than I have.

And yet . . . it’s not bad.

Tom (Jason Segel), a chef, and Violet (Emily Blunt), a psychology grad student, are forced into a five-year engagement–as they incur various problems–after Tom proposes marriage. Besides some agreeable details in the script (by Stoller and Segel), what interests us is that this is one romantic comedy that takes romantic love seriously. Such love truly exists between Tom and Violet, and the chemistry between Segel and Blunt is palpably good. Blunt, by the way, is excellent; Segel passable.

The writing doesn’t always hold up, as when Tom all but loses it over Violet’s admission that a psych professor forced a kiss on her one night. But Engagement, smutty as it is, has its charms. And it has quite a cast–hooray for Alison Brie, but let’s see more David Paymer, please.

NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 18: Actor Jason Segel walks the red carpet at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival at the Ziegfeld Theatre on April 18, 2012 in New York City. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

“Z” With Vigor

By EarlD

On September 7, 2024

In Movies

Z is a 1969 Costa-Gavras film based on the actual event of the 1963 murder of a Greek pacifist, Gregoris Lambrakis. It is a robust piece about political fervor and obsession and official depravity. Played by Yves Montand, the victim (one of them, actually) is an honest, brave but unprotected liberal, the anti-Tim Walz. He lives in the Greece of the virile, anti-communist colonels, who want for their country a kind of spiritual unity: beyond Left and Right, they say. But they are profoundly corrupt. Why, up to a point they anticipate today’s Democratic party in America with its election fraud, lawfare, Antifa, and Bennie Thompson.

(In French with English subtitles)

A British Psycho In “Fright”

By EarlD

On September 4, 2024

In Movies

The British picture Fright (1971) is only for horror buffs, if even for them. Peter Collinson (The Italian Job) directed respectably except for the early footage when he tries too hard to be suspenseful. The story itself, by Tudor Gates, is not very good. It takes an eternity, for instance, for the police and others to make the urgent moves to defeat a hair-raising psychopath, mesmerizingly acted by Ian Bannen.

Honor Blackman is in the movie, solid as a worried wife, but even better is the screaming Susan George. Miss George’s Amanda can be an endearingly quiet talker, a persevering soul standing up for herself, a terrified target, etc. She is never false and is sexily lovely to boot. Online critic Peter Hanson observes that “the atmosphere [of Fright] is laden with sex,” and this is chiefly because of George. She and the other actors have nothing to do with the film’s being rather weak.

Meet “Monsieur Vincent,” A Priest (A 1947 French Film)

By EarlD

On August 29, 2024

In General

Cover of Monsieur Vincent

The year is 1617, and a new priest, Vincent de Paul, arrives in a French town which has had no priest for a long time.

It shows. One of the themes of the 1947 biopic, Monsieur Vincent, is the demanding struggle of the clergyman to tame the unchurched, the brutish, the shallow. Father Vincent’s first stop in the little town is the filthy, abandoned local church, an enormous hovel with cobwebs. Many, not all, of the townspeople are dirt poor, and Vincent, formerly a priest in Paris, wishes to live with and help them. At first they are also sorely afraid of a nonexistent plague. The sequence in which Vincent holds a funeral service for a woman thought to have had the plague, while a crowd of reluctant people walks up and starts crossing themselves, points up a European Catholicism still perfectly imperishable, of course, in the seventeenth century. Director Maurice Cloche handles this scene, and all the other scenes, as he ought to have.

The best handling is by the playwright Jean Anouilh, who wrote the script, purveying such other themes as the question of what to devote one’s life to and the rich’s responsibility, if any, to the poor. With flair Pierre Fresnay enacts Vincent, and the good costumes make us wish the film was in color. All in all, a worthy motion picture.

(In French with English subtitles)

Cynical But . . . “Diary of a Mad Housewife”

By EarlD

On August 26, 2024

In Movies

Carrie Snodgrass is properly restrained as the repressed and anguished Tina Balser in Frank Perry‘s Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), adapted from a novel by Sue Kaufman. Richard Benjamin is exactly right as her nagging, self-serving husband and Frank Langella does a “natural” job as the arrogant writer Tina accepts as a lover. The movie deplores the depersonalizing of women by men and is rather cynical about the shallowness of human beings.

Diary is a bit too brazen, a bit daring in a bad way. The sins of the men are laid on thick, and people’s insipidness never ends. Though Snodgrass is interesting and has a fine voice, she doesn’t look good in the nude. None of this wrecks the movie, though, notwithstanding I liked Perry’s Doc and probably Last Summer (I need to see it again) better.